se the terrible king. He pleads that, if he must join the ghastly
army of the dead, he ought, at least, to be allowed to finish his supper.
This the king grants, and in the end, after Gringoire has won the heart
of the heroine, he receives his life and a fair bride with a full dowry.

_Gringoire_ is a play very different from M. De Banville's other dramas,
and it is not included in the pretty volume of "Comedies" which closes
the Lemerre series of his poems. The poet has often declared, with an
iteration which has been parodied by M. Richepin, that "comedy is the
child of the ode," and that a drama without the "lyric" element is
scarcely a drama at all. While comedy retains either the choral ode in
its strict form, or its representative in the shape of lyric enthusiasm
(_le lyrisme_), comedy is complete and living. _Gringoire_, to our mind,
has plenty of lyric enthusiasm; but M. De Banville seems to be of a
different opinion. His republished "Comedies" are more remote from
experience than _Gringoire_, his characters are ideal creatures, familiar
types of the stage, like Scapin and "le beau Leandre," or ethereal
persons, or figures of old mythology, like Diana in _Diane au Bois_, and
Deidamia in the piece which shows Achilles among women. M. De Banville's
dramas have scarcely prose enough in them to suit the modern taste. They
are masques for the delicate diversion of an hour, and it is not in the
nature of things that they should rival the success of blatant
buffooneries. His earliest pieces--_Le Feuilleton d'Aristophane_ (acted
at the Odeon, Dec. 26th, 1852), and _Le Cousin du Roi_ (Odeon, April 4th,
1857)--were written in collaboration with Philoxene Boyer, a generous but
indiscreet patron of singers.

"Dans les salons de Philoxene
Nous etions quatre-vingt rimeurs,"

M. De Banville wrote, parodying the "quatre-vingt ramuers" of Victor
Hugo. The memory of M. Boyer's enthusiasm for poetry and his amiable
hospitality are not unlikely to survive both his compositions and those
in which M. De Banville aided him. The latter poet began to walk alone
as a playwright in _Le Beau Leandre_ (Vaudeville, 1856)--a piece with
scarcely more substance than the French scenes in the old Franco-Italian
drama possess. We are taken into an impossible world of gay
non-morality, where a wicked old bourgeois, Orgon, his daughter
Colombine, a pretty flirt, and her lover Leandre, a light-hearted scamp,
bustle through their